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The Land Use Dialogue (LUD)

The Land Use Dialogue (LUD) Initiative, a multi-country engagement platform coordinated by The Forests Dialogue along with a variety of local and global partners, seeks to gather knowledge and lead processes enabling responsible business, improved governance and inclusive development in landscapes at risk of deforestation. TFD’s dialogues focus on engaging a diversity of interests to foster relationships and build trust around contentious forest and landscape issues; craft a shared understanding of the objectives, challenges and opportunities ahead; and seek change through consensus-based collaboration aimed at immediate action and long-term progress.

The LUD is the first of TFD’s initiatives to utilize an ongoing platform at a landscape scale and therefore different from past TFD Initiatives that are more theme driven. It aims to understand and improve the practical implementation of the ‘landscape approach’ in order to address the often-competing interests of different stakeholders in a landscape, which is central to sustainable land management and key for broader economic and social development. While there is a growing body of research on the landscape approach, there is still a lack of real-world examples of how it can lead to tangible improvements on the ground. One of the factors hindering better impact on the ground particularly in terms of addressing deforestation and land-use change is the lack of constructive dialogue as the basis for exploring and reconciling stakeholder perspectives in landscapes that matter. The LUD initiative seeks to fill this void.